There’s always a lot going on in a state of 39 million people, and delivering the “Bear Essentials” each week typically involves a raft of stories spanning our “core four” policy areas (housing production and affordability, homelessness, water and energy security, jobs and the economy), plus a few edge cases we think you’ll find interesting.

But every now and then, a report comes out that so perfectly crystallizes our raison d'être that it deserves the full spotlight, unencumbered by the other news of the week.

So it is this week, with the release of a devastating report by the California Policy Lab, a UC research institute rooted in UC Berkeley, UCLA and Sacramento. “Priced Out: Relocation Amidst California’s Affordability Crisis” makes a point that is both gut-wrenchingly obvious and apparently still in need of documentation: California’s cost of living is not merely pressuring households, it is deciding who gets to stay and who gets shown the door.

Drawing on anonymized longitudinal credit-bureau data tracking households from 2016 to 2025, the report looks at who leaves, where they land, and what their finances look like afterward. Its central conclusion is blunt: People aren’t leaving because they hate the sun and the surf. Affordability is the primary engine of out-migration.

Californians who ditch the Golden State for more inviting economic climes end up in neighborhoods with average monthly housing costs that are $672 lower. Renters move into places with rents about $631 lower, while homeowners relocate to neighborhoods where median home values are nearly $396,000, or 48%, lower. Seven years after leaving, they are 11 percentage points more likely to own a home than comparable Californians who stayed. The authors stop short of claiming airtight causation, which is fair enough, but the implication is hard to miss: for a great many households, leaving California improves the odds of housing stability and ownership.

The report also punctures the lazy stereotype that the people leaving are drawn mainly from our poorest communities. They are not. In fact, the share of people exiting from higher-income neighborhoods rose 6.4 points, or 19%, from the pre-pandemic to post-pandemic periods. But those movers are in shakier financial positions than the neighbors they leave behind. Their credit scores are 17 points lower. Their student debt is $5,508 higher. Their credit card utilization is 3.6 percentage points higher. Their homeownership rate is 10.9 percentage points lower. In other words, these are not households in utter collapse. They are households being slowly, efficiently squeezed. They are comfortable enough to want what California offers, but not secure enough to build a durable life inside its price structure.

On where they go, the report does a nice job of bulldozing some very tired political folklore. Per capita, Californians are mostly moving to nearby states, not to the cable-news fantasylands of the national culture war. Nevada is the largest net recipient, hauling in 81 Californians per 10,000 residents each year, with Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona close behind. Texas (*shakes fist) ranks 11th. And Florida, with its unacceptable humidity and proliferation of alligators, comes in a distant 20th. The study makes an important point that often gets ignored: falling entrances matter just as much as rising exits. Forty-two states now send fewer people to California than they did a decade ago, and in 34 of them that decline was larger than any increase in departures. At the population level, that is not a rounding error. Net domestic out-migration has been the biggest driver of California’s slower growth over the last quarter-century. At the pandemic peak in late 2020, exits exceeded entrances by 60%. Even in 2025, nearly 150,000 more people left the state than arrived.

From the NCC’s point of view, this is not merely a migration report. It is a receipts-filled indictment of the status quo. Our mission is to restore common-sense governance, rapidly expand housing supply, grow middle-income jobs, and give political voice to the 9.7 million common-sense voters who want to live, thrive and see their children an opportunity to prosper in the Golden State. What this report makes plain is that housing scarcity and cost are not abstract policy defects for experts to mumble over on panels. They are actively rearranging California’s social and economic map, pushing out the very households that ought to form the backbone of a broadly shared economy. 

None of this gets fixed with better messaging or nobler posturing. We can’t wring our hands more creatively, or offer more empty genuflection to equity and values. People are leaving because the math is bad, and bad math has an uncanny ability to expose and humiliate even the best political spin.

Meaningful change is going to take disciplined, long-horizon action. We’ve got to build more housing, remove barriers to growth, strengthen middle-income opportunity, and make California easier to choose again. That’s the work in front of us at the New California Coalition. Thanks for joining us in the fight.

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